


all up the seething coast

by cryptidgay



Series: cry for judas [1]
Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Character Undeath, Dissociation, Gen, Ghosts, Morally Gray Jaylen Hotdogfingers, Murder, season 7, seattle garages
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:42:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26850853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptidgay/pseuds/cryptidgay
Summary: When Jaylen collapses onto home plate, she spends three hours with her fingertips at the fragile skin of her neck, feeling her own cautious heartbeat grow steadier.It takes a half hour for it to beat at all. Theth-thumpof it, when it begins, is deafening after so long in silence.(Jaylen returns with debts to pay.)
Relationships: Jaylen Hotdogfingers & Mike Townsend
Series: cry for judas [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2009932
Comments: 19
Kudos: 66





	all up the seething coast

**Author's Note:**

> standard blaseball fic disclaimer: i pick and choose which fanon to use, so this might not be fanon-compliant. tried to keep it as canon-compliant as i could in terms of actual games, but, y'know, liberties have been taken.
> 
>  **content warnings:** jaylen-typical murder spree; extensive discussions of death; dissociation.
> 
> title from _[all up the seething coast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHLK5TaxxKM)_ by the mountain goats.

When Jaylen collapses onto home plate, she spends three hours with her fingertips at the fragile skin of her neck, feeling her own cautious heartbeat grow steadier.

It takes a half hour for it to beat at all. The  _ th-thump _ of it, when it begins, is deafening after so long in silence.

***

Rewind.

There are moments when the world cracks open. And everything you knew is wrong, and everything you knew is now unknown, and everything —  _ everything _ — becomes unfamiliar, even the hand in front of your face, attached to your arm, which is attached to your shoulder, which is attached to the body you’ve seen in the mirror every day of your goddamn life. Even that is now a stranger.

The light is sudden and blinding. It’s a high-powered flashlight shone directly against her retinas; it’s the Moab-turned-Hellmouth sun cranked up to eleven. Jaylen’s hand covers her eyes before she can think about it.

It’s unfathomable after five years spent in the shadows of the shadows.

All things considered: the void isn’t that bad. It was empty when she arrived, a no-star stadium with seats just this side of uncomfortable and days that blurred together whenever she forgot to pay attention to their passing. No sun, no moon, no eclipses to portend certain doom.

The air always smells faintly of smoke. Burnt-burning flesh. Jerseys singed at the edges.

The overhead lights (turned on at some point;  _ by who, _ she pointedly does  _ not _ wonder) buzz at the edge of her mind. A thousand-thousand bees, all ready to sting.

The world blurs. Cracks. Gets colorhazed and dark and then bright-bright-bright again.

There’s a silhouette; her hand tugged on.

A blaseball in her hand. A song.

Movement on both sides.

Voices.

She can’t quite make out the chatter, and her voice is softer than it should be, hoarse and smoketinged, but she interrupts anyways. Fuck, it’s been a while since she’s talked to anyone. The others in the void certainly had conversations, but in life and in death, Jaylen’s skill has come more with throwing a ball than with  _ social graces. _

Still, she speaks. “Did we win?”

The van goes silent.

“Holy shit,” says Allison Abbott from the passenger seat, turning her entire body to stare at Jaylen.

“It worked?” says Greer Gwiffin in the driver’s seat, eyes firmly on the road ahead.

“Holy  _ shit,” _ says Theodore Duende, right beside Jaylen in the backseat.

***

(“Shit,” says Mike Townsend, in the shadows.)

***

The van parks in the middle of the field, and it is as she remembers it. The metal announcer’s box on high; the instruments scattered in the dugout, ready for impromptu post-practice jam sessions. The pitcher’s mound feels like home, still. It’s only in contrast that she realizes there were no plates, no markings at all, on the field in the void; the ever-burning players knew their routes and played their parts regardless, but the guidance is a comfort.

The stands are empty, but they were empty when she died, too. It seems fitting for the only audience to be her team. If not for the way her jersey is burnt at the edges and the way her hand, the one not preoccupied with checking her pulse, sends off faint wisps of smoke when she shifts it around, she could almost believe she had never died at all. Maybe she’d just blinked.

“You alright, Jay?” It’s Allison who crouches down on the field, looks at Jaylen with more concern than she thinks is warranted. Allison with the nail-bat, Allison with the piercing grin and blinding rage. 

The expression’s too soft for her face. Doesn’t fit well. Allison always cared about her friends, her team, but… this isn’t how the Garages showed their care. Not before.

It makes Jaylen’s skin crawl. The difference. The fucking  _ caution _ .

“Yeah,” she says. She wills her voice to be strong, but it doesn’t work. “Tired.”

“So  _ you can sleep when you’re dead _ isn’t true, then?” Jaylen doesn’t get a chance to laugh at the admittedly mediocre joke before Allison winces, apologizes. Allison doesn't _apologize,_ not in Jaylen's memory — and yet. “Sorry. Poor taste.”

“Nah, it’s —”

***

She blinks and the stands are full.

The crowd is  _ big. _ Jaylen’s seen some big fucking blaseball crowds before — went to a few Pies games even when she wasn’t playing, some Tigers games, and their stadiums were built for a million fans and always packed to the goddamn brim — but this is something new. Fans cram into every single seat in the stadium named in her honor.

She doesn’t remember when she learned the stadium was named after her.

Now that she thinks about it: there should be several weeks worth of memories between her resurrection and now. The election results were blaring in the static-gravel godvoices from up in the announcers’ booth when she came back; the entire off-season is fuzzy in her recollections, the same way her time in the void was. Blurred together.

At some point, she looked at the stadium from the outside and saw  _ Jaylen Hotdogfingers Memorial Garage and Parking Facility _ in ten-foot-tall sans-serif across the facade, but she can’t remember her reaction.

Jaylen knows how she feels about it  _ now, _ standing in the middle of the field with the Breath Mints’ batters waiting for her to make a move. The stadium with her name. The vague memory of Theo fielding her questions in the couple of months in-between that she can’t quite remember.  _ What happened to me? _ An umpire.  _ Did it happen to anyone else? _ Yes.

That single syllable echoes. Yes, more blaseball players have died. Yes, everyone else in the void with smoke clinging to their hair and their clothes and their bones beneath their skin went out the same way she did, horribly, in flames. Yes, you died for nothing, and we have done nothing to fix it. Yes, there is a price to be paid.

And Jaylen gets angry. Angrier than she thinks she’s ever been before.

There is a ball in her hand.

When she squeezes it, for a moment it feels more like bone than cowhide and yarn and cork. For another moment, it flickers out of existence entirely, a glitched shadow with no substance, and her fingers land in her palm before reality corrects itself. The danger of being dead and alive and dead at the same time is this: everything she touches joins her in that between-space. The objects she holds. The people those objects hit.

There are thousands upon thousands of eyes staring at her, and the crowd is absolutely fucking silent. Her fingers come up to the side of her neck, and she feels every fragile, precious bone there before her pulse deigns to show itself. It is weak, but it is beating.

She isn’t going to let that go away.

Jaylen lines up the pitch, and all of her death-fog snaps away, everything suddenly crystal-clear. This is why she’s here. This is why she was brought back.

This is what she has to do to stay.

Jaylen Hotdogfingers throws a ball. Dickerson Morse is hit, and there is smoke coming from both of them, now. Aftermath and prologue. Jaylen was burned. Morse  _ will _ burn.

So it goes.

The Mints are frantic and wide-eyed and fussing over their marked player. Morse sways on their feet and their teammates collect them, shepherd them back to the dugout with fear fucking radiating out of every pore, and Jaylen doesn’t notice any of it. Her smile is all sharp edges. Skeletal, deadly.

Before the game is out, two more Breath Mints will have the grim reaper hovering over them. The Garages win by a landslide the likes of which Jaylen has never seen before, and she cares about that,  _ really, _ but she cares more about the look in the Mints’ eyes when she glances over to their huddle.

Here’s the thing: with every person she hits, a little bit of the smoke hovering around  _ her _ fades away. Shifts focus.

She’s willing to live with that if it means living at all.

***

Sometime later:

The birds are squawking up an absolute racket outside Jaylen’s hotel room.

Used to be, the Garages’d get way fewer rooms than they actually needed whenever they had an overnight stay somewhere. They’d go five-six-seven to a room, pile onto a California king-size mattress and do shitty karaoke between games ‘til they got a noise complaint. They would workshop new songs, they would drink the shittiest beer the city of the night had to offer, and Theo would remind them to drink their weight in water so they wouldn’t be hungover the next day. In the pre-void days, because that’s how she’s measuring her life now, Jaylen looked forward to out-of-town games for this reason.

Nowadays, she always seems to be in a room herself. Maybe the Garages’ budget has just gotten bigger. Maybe it’s fear that puts walls between them.

The time between games hardly exists, anyways. Blaseball is a fast-moving splort. Faster when time literally blurs, when she can blink and be on the field and blink again and see the other team half-immolated.

Paper tearaway calendar on the hotel room desk says it’s two weeks into the season. Day divisible by five, which means she pitched today, even if the memory of it comes in fits and starts. The mirror on the door shows that her skin is less gray. Less smoke hanging around her. Maybe by the time she pays her debt, she’ll be able to keep track of time.

There’s a part of her that hopes by the time she is truly alive again, the Garages will welcome her back into their ranks. 

There is another, larger, louder part that says:  _ fuck them. _ They brought her back, but they weren’t ready to pay the consequence. They didn’t do anything to help her when she died. She can picture their faces staring at the mound of ashes on the field, dumbstruck, staring at the place she  _ was _ rather than bringing their bats up against the umpire that still  _ is. _

Those ashes are probably still out there somewhere; they wouldn’t have disappeared when she was brought back, and in all technicality, she is existing in two places at once. Dead, alive. In the void, in a hotel room in Dallas.

She throws a pitch at the wall. She hears the  _ thunk _ of it echo around her skull. She picks it up when it bounces back. She throws again.  _ Thunk. _ Repeat.

Eventually, with enough repetition, it starts to sound like the beat of a heart.

***

The next day, she isn’t pitching, but she sits in the stands of Hades and watches the game, anyways. Peanuts rain down from the nosebleed seats, but nobody sits within three rows of Jaylen.

She picks up a peanut and throws it, hard as she can, onto the field below. Hears the crowd go absolutely silent in the split-second before it hits Scorpler across the head and bounces off harmlessly, same as all the other peanuts.

“Jaylen, you gotta stop.”

It’s not a voice she’s heard before, and it’s not coming from anywhere she can see. When she turns her head to look around, the seats around her are still empty save for the shells littering them.

It takes her a moment to place why it sounds familiar, anyways. She hasn’t heard him in person, but she’s listened to the albums the Garages put out in her absence. Heard the voice of the pitcher who replaced her, begging to be seen as something other than a disappointment. Shifting into something else. A credit to the team. A man who knows what he has to do to save —

Well, they were never friends. That part of the song is a lie. He joined after she went up in flames, replaced her.

Still. It was Mike Townsend’s hand that pulled her out of the void. Mike Townsend who gave up the middle seat in the back of the van so she could come back.

Jaylen probably owes him a thank-you.

Instead: “What, you’re not enjoying the show?”

Now that she knows to look for it amidst the cacophony of the crowd, she can tell Mike’s in the seat to her left. If she squints, she can see the shape of him outlined in the shadows. Blaseball cap still on; outline of a Garages jersey.

“No, I’m not — you’re  _ killing people.” _

“You don’t know that,” Jaylen says. No one does, and no one will for another two weeks. She’s the only one who can see the wisp of death clinging to those she beans.

Mike doesn’t reply. When she looks to her left, even the echo of him is gone.

_ Good, _ she thinks, and throws another peanut down onto the field. It’s getting hard for the batters to move, having to wade through all of them. She thinks Allison glares up at her, but really, it’s hard to tell from such a distance.

Jaylen laughs, low and hoarse. Her voice is always smoke-tinged, like she’s constantly emerging from the burning building of her own body.

***

“Why are you doing it?”

Mike shows up again the next week, after Jaylen plays a losing game against the Steaks and only manages to hit a bird with her pitches. She’s in a fucking foul mood. Whether that’s because of the loss or the lack of bean-balls (as the announcers have so eloquently begun to call them), well, who’s to say?

“Why’s anyone do anything, Mikey-boy?” She lays back against the hard mattress of her own bed. Home game. No hotel room to feel some smoldering loneliness in, just the apartment Garages management had secured for her when she came back. Someone’d suggested her borrowing Mike’s place, all the way back then.  _ It’s empty anyways, _ they’d said, and then hadn’t said anything more, thanks to the vicious glares of the team.

She doesn’t remember who that was, now. Maybe it was her. She wouldn’t put it past herself.

The lights are out and the sun is setting, casting long shadows across the room. Mike is almost visible in them. His silhouette has some form to it, this time; she can make out the features of his unsmiling face, the way he holds himself like he’s ready to dart out of the way of a pitch at any moment. She isn’t even holding a damn ball, but they both know it doesn’t matter. It’s not the point.

“To win? For their team? For their  _ friends?” _ Poor Mike. Stuck in the shadows. Missing the point entirely.

“Nope,” Jaylen says, and she pops the  _ p _ for emphasis.

“You told us to make it to the playoffs. Before you died, you said that. Does that even matter to you, anymore?”

Jaylen scoffs. “I didn’t tell  _ you _ that. You weren’t there.”

Mike pauses, like he’s only now remembering that he joined the team after her death.  _ Was _ he there? Were the stands really empty, or was there one future blaseball pitcher sitting somewhere in them, watching, waiting to take her place? Did he hear her last words?

“I feel like I was,” he says.

Time is weird, for blaseball players. Jaylen knows this. Still, she laughs, a cruel, cold sound.

“I’m doing it to stay alive.” It’s a short explanation, but it’s all the truth she has and all the truth he needs. That’s why anyone does everything.

Anyone, with one notable exception. Mike hadn’t seemed to care about his own life, reaching into the shadows and landing flat on his ass in the void.

Doesn’t matter. His mistake might’ve saved her, but she doesn’t owe him shit.

“There has to be another way,” Mike says, softly, but she’s no longer listening.

***

Jaylen’s in the bullpen in Yellowstone, scrolling through her phone as Marshallow pitches and the eclipse casts the sky into darkness overhead, when one of the Millennials is incinerated.

Between the news notification and her Twitter feed, the video’s all over the place in a matter of seconds. She can’t see the ump’s face behind the mask, but she could swear to fucking hell that he’s grinning. Something about the way he moves. Something about the snap of his fingers, and then some player she does not recognize goes up in flames.

The news informs her that his name was Wesley Dudley.

Jaylen knows what she’s doing out here. She’d have to be dumb as a bag of rocks to  _ not _ know — just because the rest of the league hasn’t put the damn dots together yet doesn’t mean she hasn’t, and the people she’s beaned will go up in flames, and she can see the smoke already, clinging to them. Jaylen is sacrificing other lives for her own. It’s a price she is more than willing to pay.

Death with a purpose is different than the random whims of an umpire. There’s a disconnect, there. Something tightens in her throat as she watches the playback of the incineration over and over and over, sitting in the bullpen with her phone in front of her until long after the game has ended.

She can feel Mike’s eyes on her, after a while. An eclipse offers shadows aplenty.

“Shut the fuck up, Mike,” she snaps, though he is silent. He’s not even visible.

He’s dead, and she’s alive. She has the pulse to prove it. Nothing else matters.

***

The Garages are in Philly. Another eclipse hangs patiently in the sky, Philadelphia mirroring Montreal mirroring half a dozen other places in the league. The year is heavy with eclipses. The moon takes its place in front of the sun, and Jaylen can feel it waiting there: it watches, in the dark.

The first eclipse she ever saw was the day she died. A remarkably sunny day taken away in an instant, like a tablecloth pulled out in some cheap magic trick. The sun haloed; all that old wisdom about where you are and aren’t supposed to look gone to the wayside. When it happened, Jaylen was staring up.

She blinks herself back to the present.

In Montreal, the Tigers play the Talkers and five players on the field are wreathed in smoke. Jaylen isn’t looking at her phone, isn’t looking at the field; she sits in a park a couple blocks from where the rest of the Garages are losing, fucks around with a guitar she only halfway remembers how to play, but she feels it when it happens anyways.

A debt, collected.

And it’s Moody Cookbook. And it’s Elijah Bates. And it’s Mclaughlin Scorpler. And every time it happens, her place in the here-and-now solidifies, just a bit.

It’s fucking exhilirating. She’s laughing long before she processes that the sound is coming from her own throat. Couple’a people in the park give her the beginning of a dirty look before realizing why they recognize her and averting their eyes. They’re all fucking  _ terrified _ of her.

She laughs and she laughs.

***

Mike rarely announces his presence, but the difference between an empty space and a space occupied by an extra person is a stark one. Jaylen is hyperaware of life, of the lack of it, and Mike sits somewhere in the outfield of life. Not quite out of its bounds, but… Not alive, either.

It’s not the void Jaylen was in, that’s for damn sure. Unless the universe is trying out some ghost of blaseball games past bullshit with here —  _ here’s a spirit to be your conscience until you can grow one yourself, asshole _ — the dead can’t interact with the living.

So Mike is somewhere in-between, where only Jaylen can see him.

“Don’t,” she says. Mike hasn’t said anything yet, but he will. Or he’ll just stare at her disapprovingly from across the room. That’s worse, in some ways. A lot of ways. At least when he speaks she can talk back, fill the silence up with something concrete.

“I’m not saying anything,” Mike says. Defensive in that quiet way; she wonders if he was like that when the team wrote about him being a disappointment, too, or if he’d stayed quiet, locked outside the Garage wallowing.

Her guitar’s leaning against the wall next to the couch, and it’s a few quick movements to pick it up, strum the opening tune of  _ Mike Townsend (Is a Disappointment) _ , watch the frown on Mike’s half-invisible face deepen.

She blinks and the guitar’s down again. Mike’s sitting next to her on the couch. He’s got a question hanging off his lips, and Jaylen gives him a look easily translatable to  _ spit it out. _

“What do you think’s gonna happen?”

“What?”

“I mean, with all the incinerations? Ten of them, now, right? I was just wondering… Well, when does it  _ end?” _

Jaylen doesn’t have an answer, so she falls back on the neverending well of anger that boils in her chest. “Who the fuck says it ends?”

Mike pauses, and out of the corner of her eye, Jaylen can see him gnawing his bottom lip. “Gotta stop sometime, Jaylen.”

More anger:  _ “Why?” _

“Because,” and Mike is trying so blatantly to sound brave that it’s almost hilarious, “y’know, I watched your games. Back before. And then I watched the reruns online, over and over, once I was on the team, because I was like,  _ how does she do that? How can  _ I _ do that? _ And you know what stood out to me?”

“What,” Jaylen says, flat.

“You looked so happy out there. All the time. You’d grin, and you’d hug the team after the game, and, y’know, you just looked like you were having  _ so much fun.” _

Jaylen’s quiet now. She thinks about rummaging through her backpack and finding a blaseball to lob at Mike’s head, but there’s a fifty-fifty chance it’d pass through and a hundred-percent chance it wouldn’t do anything to him, regardless.

All she would need to do to get rid of him is turn on the light. She makes no move towards the lamp switch.

“You don’t look like that now,” Mike says, gently. She wonders if he ever stops being gentle. If it was that kindness that endeared him to the team, or if he actually stood up for himself, told them to knock it the fuck off.

Jaylen doesn’t remember the last time she smiled on the field, the rush of a debt-paying incineration notwithstanding. There’s no chance in hell of her saying that aloud. Not to Mike, not to  _ anyone. _ Too fucking vulnerable.

“Maybe I’m focused on other things,” Jaylen says.

“Like killing people?”

“Like staying the fuck alive.” She throws her words at him, but the pitch doesn’t land, and when she blinks, he’s gone.

***

There’s a joke in Seattle and it goes like this: an undead pitcher walks into a bar and the bar catches fire. An undead pitcher walks into a bartender and the bartender dies. An undead pitcher walks onto a field and the funeral pyre can be seen from Mars.

Jaylen Hotdogfingers walks into the bar on the corner of her street. It sprung up sometime in the last five years. Used to be a really good Indian restaurant. No one she’s asked remembers the name of it;  _ you must be mixing it up with somewhere else, _ they say, but she knows the past so much better than she knows the present.

The bar is mediocre but the drinks are strong. Her days are less blurred together with every death. Ten lives gone up in smoke, and in return, her hands feel like her own, her pulse is almost always there when she goes to check, and she has a frankly obscene amount of free time to be filled with  _ doing things _ lest she die again of boredom. It’s almost tempting to miss the months that’d blurred past, the only moments of clarity her time on the mound, but, well. She doesn’t.

They’ve made it to the playoffs. And they’re down by two games, but she’s not in the lineup for the next two, so there’s absolutely  _ nothing _ she can do about that. If they don’t advance, she doesn’t get another chance until next season. There’ll be months and months before she’s on the field again, save for breaking in to practice in the off-season.

The rest of the Garages are worrying over Malik. One of the Wings died on the field today. Jaylen wasn’t pitching and didn’t bother showing up to the game, but the rush of payment to whatever god allowed her this second chance and the endless sea of Twitter notifications clued her in pretty quickly. The video clips show the ashes littering the field as Malik wobbles on his feet, passes out mid-bat. Someone must’ve carried him off the field.

A few of the Garages texted her, telling her not to show up to practice. As if she would have. She hasn’t been to a blaseball practice all season, and after the cold reception at the first and only band practice she’d tried to make an appearance at, well. That was a lost cause before it’d even started.

Jaylen is only a member of the Garages because they brought her back, won the Lottery Pick. She isn’t privy to their conversation anymore. It’s easy to imagine what they talk about, regardless: the whispering about what they should  _ do _ about their terrible murderess, the plans to shell her or kill her again.

Last week, one of the Mints was incinerated while she was pitching, and every single person in the stadium looked at her, their thoughts loud and clear:  _ it should’ve been Jaylen. The umps killed her once, they could do it again. _

They won’t. She’s making their job easier. Hasn’t decided how she feels about that, so she locks the thought away somewhere deep and lights it on fire.

The bar is dim. The seat next to her is empty, and filled, at the same time.

“Do you think Malik’ll be okay?” Mike’s quiet. Even more so than usual.

“Probably not,” Jaylen says. Her voice is cold, but she slides the extra drink she’d ordered over the table and in front of Mike. Sometimes he can pick things up. Sometimes he can’t. The glass exists halfway between life and death now that she’s held it, so it might be able to pass into the shadows.

“Thanks,” Mike says, offhand. “Really, though. Did you know it could happen to our team, too?”

“No.”

“Do you care? Are you happy?”

“I don’t  _ know.” _ It’s too loud. She’s hyperaware of the bar’s other patrons looking away from her. An audience would be easier than this pointed ignorance. She knows what to do with eyes on her, how to frighten a crowd just by tossing a ball in the air.

“I don’t know,” she says again, quieter. Like that fixes it.

***

“What’s your deal, anyways?”

Jaylen’s broken a perfectly good silence with the question, and good fucking riddance to that. She hates the quiet since she came back. Would rather chatter at the shadow following her than sit still for a moment.

Mike hums a question mark, and Jaylen tacks some extra questions on, because she’s feeling nice today. “Theories: you’re my guardian angel. You’re the gods’ attempt at giving me a conscience. Hot or cold?”

“Cold.”

“Ghost?”

“I — I dunno, maybe?”

“You’re not where I was,” Jaylen says. No doubt about that one.

“I guess not?” Mike laughs, like he’s nervous and trying to fill space, not like anything’s actually funny. “I don’t think I wanna talk about it. I mean — I don’t think I’d know how. There’s not really words for the feeling of being half-dead, you know?”

Jaylen knows. It’s a hollow where her ribcage should be and the smoke that still,  _ still _ follows her even after nearly a dozen souls collected. It is unfathomably endless, and somehow, claustrophobic as a coffin.

“Yeah,” she says, mouth dry. “I get it.”

She puts on music to fill the silence instead. KGAR is still looping Mike’s songs in loving memory every hour or so. Doesn’t matter that some of them are insulting him; it’s fond in retrospect.

There’s a part of her that thinks he should’ve just stayed. It seems like the team really loved him by the end; they don’t even talk to her if they can help it, and it isn’t like she blames them. She’s been a loaded gun pointed at each and every one of them all season, and they must be regretting it a thousand times over by now.

Jaylen cannot go back to the void. She’s grabbed onto this second chance and fought tooth and nail and bloodied-hands to keep it.

Still. Sometimes she wonders.

***

The Wild Wings win, in the end. Garages don’t even make it to the finals.

If Jaylen’s being honest with herself, it fucking  _ sucks. _ Blaseball isn’t her life in the same way it used to be. Like, it’s  _ quite literally _ the only thing keeping her on this mortal plane, but it isn’t  _ fun _ anymore. She used to laugh and smile and do shitty karaoke with the team after games, and all of that went up in ash around the same time she did.

She wraps her fingers around her own opposite wrist tight enough to bruise Garages-jersey-blue, and feels the steady pulse of veins beneath her skin.

The funny thing about last words is that she doesn’t remember hers. It is, she thinks, understandable: the sensation of being burned alive that accompanied them was, in every possible way, overwhelming. Maybe that’s too small a word for it.  _ Fucking horrific _ would be a more accurate descriptor.

The news reports of Jaylen’s return were usually accompanied by memories of her death. They’d mourn her at the same time as they celebrated her, before they knew the cost she carried. Through a camera lens, no one could see how  _ wrong _ it was that she was there; Jaylen’s not the only blaseball player who resembles a hole in reality more than she does a living _ (ha) _ breathing  _ (ha!) _ person, but the smoke follows her nonetheless. The news framed her as a fucking miracle case.  _ Look at our pitcher, back from the dead. Her last words: We just gotta make it to the playoffs. And would you look at that, we did! And now she’s back! _

_ We just gotta make it to the playoffs. _ She doesn’t remember saying it. That doesn’t mean much.

Maybe it’s another miracle that they made it this far, second in the division. And maybe it doesn’t really matter either way. So they made it. So they brought her back. So she’s staying.

It’s lonely. Not lonelier than the void, but close.

The lights in her apartment are always off nowadays. Candles carry too much risk of fire for comfort, but she keeps battery-powered tealights around to see by; likes the artificial flicker of the light. It leaves plenty of shadows. If asked, Jaylen would never admit to anything intentional in the habit; but Mike wouldn’t ask, and Jaylen doesn’t need to answer.

There’s something terrible about the silence. Mike hasn’t appeared, shadows or otherwise. Her heartbeat booms in her ears, alternating with every waltz-time beat between comforting and horrifyingly wrong. It should be easy by now, but it’s only getting worse with every moment of increased clarity, and she blinks, and —

Jaylen stands in the middle of the Hotdogfingers Memorial Garage. One stray overhead light buzzes somewhere in the ceiling, having missed the memo that the stadium has been vacated, the Garages on vacation for the post-post-season. Waste of energy. Not nearly enough light to see by; it just hums like a swarm of wasps, makes the quiet of the stadium more deafening by way of contrast.

When Jaylen steps up to the mound, her footsteps should not make a sound against the astroturf and dirt. They echo around the garage regardless, resounding off every harsh metallic wall.

She looks down at her hand and is, somehow, unsurprised to see a blaseball gripped tightly in it.

There’s no game happening. No one for her to hurt, nothing to claw herself further into the light with; there is Jaylen and a room devoid of life, only her footsteps and her heartbeat and that one stubborn fluorescent light making any sound whatsoever. If she holds the ball tightly enough, she can feel her own pulse echoing through it. Like it’s something else she’s holding. Vastly more fragile, more deadly.

When Jaylen died, she was the best pitcher in the league. This is no longer true. Even then, she wouldn’t have been able to make this throw, but she winds her arm back and aims, with every shred of force in her, at the announcer’s box up on high.

It’s empty. Of course it’s empty. But the glass shatters downwards with a crash to rival the voice of the gods, and the ball collides neatly with the microphone sitting on the desk inside. Jaylen hears it clatter to the floor. The hum of the light is joined by the screech of the mic. Smoke pours out the windows.

This can’t be all her second chance is for. She’s going to find something better.

From somewhere in the stands, Mike gives her a thumbs up.

“I’m renegotiating my debt,” Jaylen calls up to — well, who the fuck knows? Someone’s listening. Something’s listening. Maybe they’re laughing at her, maybe they’re not, but she still has a life left to live.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! leave a comment if you enjoyed; it'll make my day!
> 
> find me on tumblr @ [haunthouse](http://haunthouse.tumblr.com)! claws up! stream encore by the garages!


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